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The world’s most used online payment processing vendor was struggling to manage credit and risk on their broad platform. The vendor needed strong risk analysis tools and an analytics dashboard to answer risk-related questions for both merchants and consumers.
A group of high-performing engineers and business analysts formed a product platform team to kick off this new initiative. With funding in place an an experienced platform engineer at the helm, the team started developing features for technical capabilities that would comprise the new intelligence automation platform.
It quickly became evident that this team's mission to build an intelligence platform wasn't necessarily aligned with solving a customer problem. They were missing a critical part of the picture: the voice of the customer. What did a credit risk analyst need in order to make risk trade-off decisions?
The customer engaged Sketch to guide the new team. Together, we agreed that the primary objective for this phase of the engagement was to plan the first value increment successfully. Additionally, we determined that this team should adopt proven agile software development practices, which were new to the team. Sketch leveraged our value framework that outlined core elements for team success.
First, create alignment around a common purpose and publish a product vision. This grounded the team while driving direction and decision making. The team needed visible goals to ensure they were always working on the right things at the right time for the right reason.
Over multiple working sessions, we co-developed a high-level roadmap and the beginnings of a leadership backlog. This leadership backlog gave delivery and enablement teams a clear escalation path to mitigate risks, dependencies, and impediments quickly. With the vision, goals, and mitigation plans established, it was time to rethink the team's structure.
Specifically, the client needed to transition from a team structure focused on building an intelligence platform to one organized by customer value. The unit became six cross-functional, value-aligned delivery teams. This structure supported the requirement of quickly responding to changing business priorities.
One of the goals of this effort was to iteratively and incrementally build a secure, reliable, and
responsive data platform. Technical excellence wasn't enough, though—the platform had to address end-user needs. In order to do that Sketch worked with the teams to build the foundation necessary to operate in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment.
Sketch also provided coaching and consultation to help the team adapt to continuous delivery. After two and a half months, the team had set meaningful goals, built an execution plan, aligned themselves with customers and stakeholders, and aligned around a Product Roadmap. The Risk Assessment Platform Teams were now ready to deliver their first value increment (and many more after that).
We hope these are the kinds of outcomes you were looking for. If you want to learn more about the work that went into this project, we're happy to answer your questions.
Better yet, let's talk about whichever project you were mulling over that brought you here. We love to talk shop, and the first few conversations are always free.
